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- A Perfect Match
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- Author: Jill McGown
- Reviewer: Sonali T. Sikchi
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press, New York
- Format: Adult, Fiction, Hardcover, 189 Pages, 1983
- ISBN: 0312600690
- Rating: * * *½ Quills
- www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0312600690/scriquil
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- "The September dawn crept over the sky like water on blotting paper, spreading a fine, thin light to supplement the yellow glow of the street lighting." So begins Jill McGown's first literary whodunit, following in the fine tradition of British crime writers, such as Ngaio Marsh and P.D. James.
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- Julia Mitchell, a beautiful young widow, lies strangled by a boating lake. Her movements prior to her death are known, as well as all the people with whom she had any interactions. The evidence point to Chris Wade, the young man last seen with her, as corroborated by multiple witnesses. However, the deeper Inspector Lloyd and Sergeant Judy Hill dig into the mystery, the more clues pop up that tangle up an otherwise straightforward conviction.
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- The minute after I had my "aha" moments, McGown would throw in information that would murk up the picture. And thus, I followed along, page after page, to the story's startling conclusion.
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- McGown's characters are at the heart of her plot. The story flows naturally from them, and as the plot develops, so do the characters. They also reinforce the setting of a provincial little English town by mannerisms, speech and interactions with each other. For a debut novel, McGown writes sophisticated dialogue, which she uses to develop characters, uncover elements of the crime and to further the plot McGown's excellent eye for detail allows us to run the story in our heads like a movie as we read.
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- Her stylistic location of the last paragraphs of every chapter to anthropomorphic thoughts and movements of different animals in the forest just didn't work for me — it brought the story to a crashing halt, and what should've been a cliffhanger for the chapters ended up deflating the built-up tension. However, this was a comparatively minor bump in an otherwise excellently written story. I look forward to seeing this writer grow into her talent.
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